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Stephen G. Petrani is a full-time graphic designer and part-time instructor at Bradley University in the United States. He enjoys working in Photoshop… More about Stephen↬
Step-by-step Guide To Creating Digital Textures In Photoshop
Photoshop can be used for much more than retouching images or manipulating photos. You can create your own textures. In this article, Stephen Petrani will introduce the basics of techniques to help you create custom textures. He went over the three Photoshop features he relies on for most of his textures – filters, layer styles, and brushes. You’ll find that creating high-quality textures for art or design doesn’t require the talent of a craft painter. All it takes is a little understanding of Photoshop and knowing the tools and how to manipulate them to get the effect you want.
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Textures are everywhere – the concrete on the pavement, the material on your chair, even the glass (or plastic) surface of the screen you’re staring at right now. It is natural that we are drawn to textures because we see and feel them every day. And it’s no surprise why textures have become such an important element in design—so important, in fact, that I want to share with you tricks and tools for creating your own textures using Photoshop.
Photoshop is not just for retouching images or manipulating photos. It can be used for much more, such as creating your own textures – as long as you know where to look. In this article, I will present a base of techniques that will help you create custom textures.
I’ll go through the three Photoshop features I rely on for most of my texturing – filters, layer styles, and brushes. Before we jump in, I want to show the importance of textures. Consider the image below:
In the image above, we see a scene without textures. (OK, there is one texture, flat gray. Without at least one texture, the image wouldn’t exist.) The second image (right) shows a fully textured scene (wood on frame, dusty table top, dust on chair, etc. .). In fact, this entire image was created in Photoshop (without using external images), using many of the techniques described in this article. Note that this article explores how to create textures, but if you are interested in learning more about using texture as an element in design, further reading is included at the end of this article.
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Filters are still considered by many to be cheap gimmicks that have no real applicable function in Photoshop. (I know, I used to be on that side of the fence.) On the contrary, Photoshop filters are extremely powerful effects that, when used correctly, can produce amazing results. If filters aren’t part of your regular Photoshop workflow, I encourage you to revisit these underappreciated effects and use the tips below to get started.
No one ever said you can only apply one filter. Instead, try adding a second, third, or more. Experiment with multiple filters and see how they interact to create new effects. Filter gallery panel (
) even has a set of filters where you can see an example of how multiple filters work together. The image below shows how the Craquelure filter becomes much more interesting by simply applying it to the Reticulation filter via the filter gallery.
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Let’s look again at how some filters work together to create custom textures. The image below shows a basic example of this.
The image below shows the steps needed to recreate this texture. The texture starts with a blank canvas (left). Add a noise filter (
) (middle) introduces randomness to the scene and lays a good foundation for the next filter. Because filters work by manipulating pixels on a layer, the order in which you apply the filters is important. Therefore, applying a relief filter (
Moreover, some filters give better results only if they are applied more than once. Consider the image below the circled grid. Apply the Spherize filter (
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) gives only a mild result (medium). However, applying it a second time creates a more convincing sphere (right).
Tip: Before applying a filter, convert the layer to a smart object to enable smart filters. Smart filters are non-destructive and can be edited on the fly.
Experiment with different combinations of filters to see how they interact. You’ll soon be able to predict how a filter might work with another filter to create a certain effect. Let’s move on to the next tip.
Tiling textures, while desirable, often require a lot of time and effort – why not let Photoshop do most of the work for you? Some filters (such as clouds and noise) will naturally be covered when the document size is at level 2 (for example 256 × 256, 512 × 512, even 512 × 1024). If you start with one of these textures as a base and build on it, you’ll find that you can quickly create some complex textures that are placed with little or no extra effort. The image below shows an example of a texture created using the Clouds filter as a starting point.
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) applied to a document of size 1024 × 1024 pixels. Similar to noise, the cloud filter provides a degree of randomness that works well with other filters.
At this point, we can freely adjust the dimensions of the image without compromising the ability to place tiles. Therefore, by adjusting the size over
, we can print the texture by holding it with the tiles (left). Now, if we add the Posterize effect (
), we can break the texture into more shades of gray with more defined edges (middle). Filter Find Edges (
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To learn the whole process of creating this texture, check out my “Custom Wood Texture in Adobe Photoshop” tutorial.
Layer styles are another way to introduce texture to a scene. They provide additional options for decorating layer content. Experimenting with each setting in the Layer Styles panel to find out how it works is always good practice. Below are some tricks I use when working with layer styles.
When you create textures in Photoshop, blending modes do exactly what they say: they blend. Multiple texture layers can be seamlessly blended into a single composite texture, as seen below:
Tip: working with grayscale textures when using blending modes makes blending much more controlled (color can always be added later).
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If you’re trying to make complex textures, it can be difficult to pull them off in one go. Instead, try breaking down a complex texture into a set of simpler subtextures. Consider the texture of the table in the four images below. Each image represents a simple texture that blends with others to create a more complex final texture.
Using Layer Styles may be an obvious choice, but many people often overlook the Advanced Blending section of the default Layer Styles panel. Some of the more powerful blending options are hidden in plain sight. Here you can decide how the layer mask will affect the style: will it hide the layer style or just limit it to the visible part of the layer? At the bottom of the menu are the “Blend If” sliders. These sliders can easily produce complex blending effects.
Take a picture below. Excellent color texture is created with minimal effort using the Blend If slider.
The “Blend If” sliders control how a layer blends into the layers below it, as illustrated in the images below. The initial color layer (left) looks too flat, but there’s enough variation to make the Blend If sliders work. Next, wide white areas are painted on the new layer (right) to define where the blending will occur. Adjusting the “Blend If” slider of the white layer will produce a glow effect in the image above.
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To learn more about how this image was created, check out my tutorial on creating a brush in Photoshop.
Sometimes a layer will benefit from two of the same layer style with different settings. In previous versions of Photoshop, this was difficult to achieve without using destructive techniques. With the introduction of Smart Objects in CS2 – and now with the ability to add layer styles to layer groups in CS6 – Photoshop makes it easy to use and reuse multiple layer styles on the same layer. This technique was used to make the liquid and the glass bottle in the scene below.
By just examining the fluid of the scene, it starts with a generic shape on its own layer (left). Inner Shadow and Gradient Overlay layer styles are assigned to the (center) layer. The layer turns into a smart object, which makes this possible
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